Stephen Pelletiere, formerly senior political analyst on Iraq for the Central Intelligence Agency during the Iran-Iraq war, refutes the Bush Administration’s oft-repeated claim that Saddam Hussein gassed Iraqi Kurds in 1988. A United States Defense Intelligence Agency report even “asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas”.
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From Eric Meyer photography comes good clean fun for good clean people.
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As election day 2004 draws near, the world will be watching the US closely. Will we be served a rerun of the current family-oriented comedy? Will the action spectacular get any more violent? Which way will the political intrigue cookie crumble? Turn down the volume on Springer and pull up a plastic garden chair, WatchBlog is bringing you the news.
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I’m not even going to begin trying to explain this. You’ll need Flash, some free time, and a brief suspension of belief.
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The British Sunday Times (quoting Alastair Campbell) reports that the American-led Iraq Survey Group searching for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq “have run out of places to look”. The teams “are reduced to revisiting sites already checked by United Nations weapons inspectors earlier this year and sitting around in bombed-out palaces watching films.” According to the Times, intelligence officials have resorted to renaming sites in an apparent effort to create the illusion of new information being generated. The Pentagon has promised that the search would be “long-term, detailed and methodical”. A case of searching until they either find something, or the public forgets?
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A 28-year-old Japanese girl travels from Tokyo to Bismarck, North Dakota, apparently in search of the million dollar briefcase of ransom money buried in the snowscape, as seen in the Coen brothers’ 1996 movie, Fargo. During the course of her search, she dies. This is her story.
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From New Scientist:
Claims do not come much more controversial than the idea that water might retain a memory of substances once dissolved in it. The notion is central to homeopathy, which treats patients with samples so dilute they are unlikely to contain a single molecule of the active compound, but it is generally ridiculed by scientists.
Holding such a heretical view famously cost one of France’s top allergy researchers, Jacques Benveniste, his funding, labs and reputation after his findings were discredited in 1988.
Yet a paper is about to be published in the reputable journal Physica A claiming to show that even though they should be identical, the structure of hydrogen bonds in pure water is very different from that in homeopathic dilutions of salt solutions. Could it be time to take the “memory” of water seriously?
Probably not.
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Having only recently heard the term, I’ve discovered more and more sites on Googie Architecture. What is it, you may ask? Well, in the words of the excellent Googie Architecture Online: “Googie architecture was born of the post-WWII car-culture and thrived in the 1950s and 1960s. Bold angles, colorful signs, plate glass, sweeping cantilevered roofs and pop-culture imagery captured the attention of drivers on adjacent streets. Bowling alleys looked like Tomorrowland. Coffee shops looked like something in a Jetsons cartoon. For decades, many ‘serious’ architects decried Googie as frivolous or crass. But today we recognize how perfectly its form followed its function.”
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From the Dilbert Newsletter:
My brother works for the Government of Transport [sic!] in Belgium, and was hired 6 years ago. He finished the job he was hired for 5 years ago… and they failed to find him something else to do. So now he basically does nothing all day and receives a pretty good paycheck. In fact, a couple of months ago he got called by his boss because they found out he used the Internet too much, and the boss said, “I don’t even know who you are, and I don’t care, but you don’t seem to have a real job around here. Could you just use the internet a little less?”
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Crank Dot Net is devoted to presenting Web sites by and about cranks, crankism, crankishness, and crankosity. All cranks, all the time. Who knows, you might even be listed.
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In a letter to Condoleezza Rice, US Representative Henry Waxman (of the Democratic Party) asks the following question:
“Since March 17, 2003, I have been trying without success to get a direct answer to one simple question: Why did President Bush cite forged evidence about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities in his State of the Union address?“
Which, it would appear, is a question so good that she has thus far declined to give it a straight answer.
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Templar Studios probably have the coolest corporate site for a design shop ever.
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Most of the time, developers simply abuse Flash as a lazy shortcut to effects that could otherwise be obtained using CSS and JavaScript. The developers on Battersea Power Station are not like those developers. If you ever needed vindication for Flash in the corporate world, this is it.
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From Associated Press, reported on MSNBC:
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld speculated this week that the weapons were destroyed on the eve of fighting. His deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, said in an interview with Vanity Fair magazine that weapons of mass destruction became a war banner because it was the only reason everyone in the administration could agree upon when citing why they were going after Saddam.
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